


Trapped in the Dark

by RegalMisfortune



Series: Gibraltar Shenanigans [10]
Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: Angst, Burns, Cyberian Zarya, How do i even tag this??, Katya Does Immoral Things For The Good Of Her People (Or So She Believes), One of many vague ideas I have based on Zarya's Cyberian skin, Scars, Suicidal Thoughts, Wrongful Imprisonment, Zarya is Miserable, because i wanted to just get it out of my head so it would stop annoying me, both by the content and how it is written because it's very disjointed, this isn't nice at all just letting you know
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-16
Updated: 2017-10-16
Packaged: 2019-01-18 08:23:32
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,451
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12384483
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RegalMisfortune/pseuds/RegalMisfortune
Summary: Zarya shouldn't be awake. Her last memories were of explosions in her ears and the roof caving in on her and her team. She should be dead, not trapped inside armor that she didn't even control.The day Zarya went missing was the day no one could hear her pleas for death.





	Trapped in the Dark

**Author's Note:**

> This drabble isn't up to my usual quality since I just dumped this particular thought process into a story and posted it so I could hopefully stop thinking about it, or at least this version of it. I have a surprising amount of ideas for Zarya in her Cyberian skin, and none of them are particularly happy. Whoops. 
> 
> If you have any questions or requests, feel free to talk to me on my [tumblr!](http://regalmisfortune.tumblr.com/)

 She shouldn’t be waking up.

The last fragments of memory Zarya had was in the heat of battle, her teammates being swarmed by omnics in the shell of an old factory. It had been a major base of operations for the omnic forces, and the team knew that this was a mission none of them were coming back from. They needed to take out the enemy, make sure to put a dent into their efforts and cause them to calculate twice before ever attempting to rebuilt in the sector again.

And so they had brought the roof down on top of them in a symphony of explosions and cracking gunfire.

Zarya shouldn’t be waking up, feeling the dull throb of her heartbeat ripple an odd numbness through her veins. Her breath shouldn’t be strange and hollow in her ears, or her limbs so heavy and nonresponsive.

She should be _dead_ , but Zarya knew in a confusing instant that she wasn’t.

_“Running diagnostics.”_

Zarya felt her eyebrows scrunch together, the words robotic and lifeless as she heard them. She forced herself to crack her eyes open, perhaps hoping to find herself in a hospital despite the lack of the sharp scent of antiseptic. But all she saw was darkness, confining and pressing down on her at all sides.

“ _Subject is panicking.”_

There were several other voices joining in, but they made no sense to her as her breaths became short and raspy in her chest, trying and failing to get her arms to move, to find her way out of the unfamiliar darkness and to a source of light. Something seared through her veins, a hum of something mechanic rattling against her head, before she felt herself slumping into unconsciousness once again.

The next time she awake, there was light. Zarya could feel her eyes blink slowly, one at a time, as her vision gradually focused on the soft edges of color before her. It was as if she was looking through a narrow window, or wearing the goggles of her winter uniform to prevent snow blindness in partnership of keeping the wind and snow at bay. But as her eyes narrowed in on her surroundings, it was more like she was staring through a screen than glass.

She tried to move her fingers, and with relief they felt them wiggle despite how stiff they were. She wanted to look down but she found herself unable to move her head, frozen in place outside of the subtle movements of her fingers and toes.

A woman stepped into her vision, pulling Zarya out of her musings.

“Chairman Volskaya?” Her voice was rough, quiet and scratchy as Katya Volskaya clasped her hands behind her back, looking up at her.

“Sargent Zaryanova,” she addressed her, her face etched with the epitome of seriousness. “On the behalf of Russia, I thank you for your contributions of the past and in the future.”

Her words sounded _wrong_ \- Zarya could feel it and hear it along with every beat of her heart. Something wasn’t right at all, and her fears were confirmed as Volskaya continued.

“On a personal level, I must apologize for what has been done, and what must be done. For the sake of our country.”

Her head turned, looking over at something Zarya couldn’t see, her heart loud in her ears as Volskaya spoke.

“Begin.”

Something foreign took over her limbs, the screen flickering before her eyes as words and code she couldn’t even begin to understand flitted across her vision.

“What’s going on?!” she cried, her words hoarse but no reaction came from Volskaya.

_As if she hadn’t heard her._

Her limbs moved without her consent, flexing and turning hands encased in painted metal armor that was unfamiliar to her. She tried, desperately, to fight against it, to gain control over her own movements, but no matter what her mind screamed as her body to do, her body did nothing as if she had been disconnected from it.

“Chairman Volskaya, everything is operational.”

The voice emitted from her, but not by her own lips, the words crackling slightly in the mechanics.

“Good. Let’s run through the testing phase.”

Zarya learned quickly what she had become as her body lumbered on in this armor she found herself in. She had become what everyone else outside of this tiny facility would know as a Remote Operated Mech, a new form of mechs that were smaller but could be run without an individual present to save lives during risky operations, crafted in the vague form of a human to perform more delicate tasks and be more presentable for the public.

In truth, she had become a prisoner inside the shell of omnic- based armor painted a pretty white and pink to help offset the eeriness of the glowing blue eyes, trapping her as whatever science they were playing with had let them use her own body against her will. She had been the only one strong enough to support the armor without any critical damage despite what injuries she had obtained in her last mission, and so her own countrymen had took advantage of her to test out this insane project of desperation to get a one-up against the omnics that flooded the countryside.

No one knew that Zarya was inside the armor aside from four individuals, Volskaya included. No one knew that she was neither alive nor dead, no one knew where she was, and no one could hear her scream as words left her prison from someone hundreds of kilometers away sitting in a warm cozy office and forcing her to march through daring missions in the Siberian snow, uncaring of how the cold still settled into her bones and pushing her body to the limits as she went for days like a heartless machine.

It was, perhaps, better than the alternative, where when they did let her rest, it was shutting everything down. It plunged her into total, suffocating darkness, depriving her of any sense other than her own ragged breathing and the panicked tears that trickled down her cheeks. She couldn’t even feel her limbs then, only the dull pain through her muscles and joints and prickling numbness that tickled across her skin as she tried and failed to move, to have someone hear her and free her from the oppressive darkness until she wore herself out.

The missions were harrowing, death-defying feats as she lugged a modified version of her old particle cannon across the wilds of Siberia, but Zarya prayed to whoever was listening that they would be her last mission. She had survived explosions, omnic armies, dropping from several hundred feet- and yet all she wanted was to not wake up again, to die no matter how painful or slow it may be because _nothing_ would be as painfully suffering as what she was going through now.

The other soldiers treated her in a mix of awe and apprehension, many uncomfortable with the emotionless mask and slightly robotic voice even as the voice that wasn’t hers consoled them in that there was a real person operating the mech that saved hundreds of lives in her insane missions. It was too much like the omnics they were fighting, and yet too human as well. It was eerie, but they couldn’t deny the effectiveness that she ran through her tasks.

They thought of her as an empty shell, a tool and nothing more. No one knew that she cried herself to sleep and begging for death whenever the person controlling her dropped her into darkness for a few hours between shifts, and no one cared, believing in the words of their hero Chairman Volskaya that she was bringing in a new age of achievement to bring their omnic enemies to their knees.

The change in the day-to-day hell came when her prison was shipped back to St. Petersburg, to find herself in the office of Volskaya herself. It turned out that there was someone that needed to be found, and the only ones she could trust in this mission were the same ones that were involved with the hell that they shoved Zarya in.

And so with her faceless handler, Zarya found herself going to places she had only dreamed of going to, asking questions and inquiries as people gawked and whispered and glared at her from all sides even as the voice of her person clearly explained the lie that she was.  

She scoured country after country, from Japan to the United Kingdoms, asking after this one individual that had acquired Volskaya’s ire. Zarya knew that Volskaya wasn’t to be trusted, but when she came face to face with an omnic in the middle of Numbani, even her handler was surprised at how quiet their revered commander was.

_“She didn’t tell me you were an omnic.”_

_“She didn’t tell me you were observant.”_

It would have been funny how uneasy the voice that wasn’t hers was in dealing with Lynx Seventeen, but Zarya hadn’t been able to find humor in anything since the day she was locked inside her casing. And she knew that even if she tried to talk over the other voice, that she would never be heard. And so Zarya was silent as her prison spoke for her, giving Lynx the common nickname that they had given this particular vessel: Romulus. Far more fitting than ROM, after all, or so that’s what she had heard.

She curled in on herself as the voice spoke to the omnic, her shell’s voice clipped and short in handling the omnic. Get the information it had and leave.

But information was both helpful and not, and Lynx was very stubborn, and thus she found herself on a flight to Dorado, strapped in place and unable to move as her handler shut her visor down and plunged her into darkness with nothing more than the vibration of the turbulence to accompany her beating heart and silent tears.

Neither herself nor her absent handler saw Lynx’s ear-like devices swivel towards her direction after a particular quiet hiccup escaped her, their fingers pausing in their idle drumming as they stared at the dormant form.

Dorado was hot, but she could barely feel it as she trudged through the streets in a daze. Everything was so beautiful and bright, and she wished she could reach out and grasp the colorful strips of paper that hung from strings over the streets.

Instead, she merely went from door to door, her handler for the day determined to get what they came for regardless of how long it took. Everything hurt with every heartbeat, every thought wanted to tell her body to stop moving forever and never get back up. But the days went by and hundreds of doors were knocked and people spoken to, but even Lynx was showing signs that they wanted to rest, but Zarya knew that struggling would only make things hurt more, and so she closed her eyes and prayed for something to short circuit and put her out of her misery.

She cracked her eyes open again as the voice spoke to a young girl, and soon they were walking down to an old warehouse, cannon at the ready. The hacker, Sombra, knew about Volskaya’s involvement with omnics, and while this came to a surprise to Zarya, she wished that the hacker knew about her, as she never even mentioned the worst atrocities that the Chairman had done.

_Please, someone notice me._

The scuffle that started when her controller didn’t want to leave Sombra alive despite the short time frame they had, shooting out to punch the smaller woman. Sombra was much lither, and Zarya’s muscle ached from days of abuse. Lynx wasn’t a fighter, yelling at both of them to stop when Zarya’s screens flickered purple before winking out.

Zarya felt the panic welling in her throat as the darkness pressed down around her, her eyes frantically searching for some sort of light. But everything was dark, and she couldn’t hear anything but her increasingly frantic wheezing while her shell toppled to the ground, jarring every nerve in her body.

The light flickered back on, the view marred with cracks as she could feel herself struggling to breathe as her body remained unresponsive. Sombra stood over her, a barrel of a gun directly in her face, and Zarya couldn’t help but beg.

“Please,” she whispered, voice rough with disuse. Sombra’s face flickered from cold determination to surprise, eyes widening slightly even as Zarya continued to mumble out the same word over and over, not noticing that her voice was her own and Sombra could hear it waver and muffle behind the cracked glass, begging in that one word to let her _rest_.

Lynx came out of nowhere, metallic fingers wrapping around Sombra’s wrist. Zarya didn’t hear what they said, her eyes closing as she silently wished for everything to end.

Instead, she found herself being dragged out of the building before it fell down on top of them in fire and ash. Her screen flickered, and she couldn’t help but feel anxiety and fear surge through her once again.

“No no no. Please, not the dark.” She could feel her eyes burning with tears, struggling weakly against her prison as her screen dimmed once again and failing to do anything. She didn’t want to be in the dark anymore. She just wanted everything to stop hurting and let her _die,_ knowing that she would never wake up again.

Someone was muttering in Spanish over her head, two sets of hands grasping at the sides of her cracked mask and forced it open with a hiss.

The smell of smoke filled her lungs, causing her to wheeze as the screen was pulled away, a muttered curse from Sombra to her left as warm, smooth metal traced over the burn scars across her cheek.

“We have you,” Lynx’s voice was gentle in her ears, unprocessed by her sensors that brought a sense of relief that she didn’t think she ever could feel again. Her chest heaved with breathless hiccups as they began to pry her out of her prison for the first time since she had been forced into it, carefully navigating the wiring and bits of armor and tossing it into the inferno behind them.

She didn’t remember much else, the world a blur of color and sensations as she was carried away between two hackers, her limbs trembling and skin scarred and pale from being trapped inside her own armor for who knows how long.

And the woman who had been dead to the world disappeared into the night without a trace.


End file.
